F1 Race Stars review – karted off

Codemasters presents one of the strangest Mario Kart clones ever, as Lewis Hamilton and co. are transformed into pint-sized racers…

F1 Race Stars (PS3) – Super Mario Andretti Kart

We’re not sure why the video games industry insists on hiring gin-sozzled tramps to organise its release schedules, but we do wish they’d improve their hiring policies. Friendly cooperation is not something games companies are famed for but surely someone, at some point, should’ve realised that releasing three Mario Kart clones in the space of two weeks was probably not a good idea.

F1 Race Stars and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed are both out this Friday, and while we haven’t so far played enough of Sega’s game to comment we have already been disappointed by last week’s LittleBigPlanet Karting. It’s certainly not the worst Mario Kart clone ever made, with a solid driving model. But the course design is bland and there’s a general sense that it relies too much on user customisation to make any interesting use of the core mechanics.

But while LittleBigPlanet Karting’s unique selling point is its creation tools F1 Race Stars exists for the same reason most Mario Kart games do. To make a quick profit certainly, but also to promote a brand – in this case Formula 1 itself. From such ignoble begins it’s no wonder most Mario Kart games are so forgettable, but this one comes perilously close to being worthwhile.

For a start it has a surprisingly attractive art style, which gives its stars an even more chiselled jaw than usual and a distinctive look to the scenery that we’d be more than happy to see reused in other games. The way the tracks are based on real-life circuits but include both loose replications and fantasy elements based on the track’s location (so a Bowser-like cast in Germany, bullet trains in Japan, and a giant hotel in Dubai) also work very well.

But in other areas the F1 licence is a serious detriment, with the FIA insisting that the game still pays at least lip service to the real sport. Tragically that means no drifting, and a Mario Kart game without is drifting is like, well… a boring racing game. The handling of your pretend cars is fine, but because there’s no drifting that means an awful lot of breaking and slipstreaming, and doing all the other serious F1 things that most people will presumably have come to this game to avoid.

We can certainly see the FIA’s logic, but if they’d just let it be a proper Mario Kart clone at least it would have been fun. But a grossly simplified F1 game is a bad idea right from the start, and no amount of attractive cartoon visuals can change that (even if it is kind of funny to have KERS substituting for the turbo system).

It doesn’t help that the cars are so slow or that the weapons and power-ups so feeble. Again this seems to be a restriction of the licence, with most of the pick-ups revolving around differently coloured bubbles.

Predictably the red ones are homing missiles, but just to mix things up a bit the yellow ones are unguided missiles and the blue ones work like banana peels. An explosion of ticker tape stands in for a Blooper spitting ink at your screen and the safety car works as the blue shell equivalent by holding up those in front of you.

Not only are the weapons unimaginative and visually uninteresting but only the two Ferrari drivers can fire red bubbles backwards, which unnecessarily limits the tactics. Each team has a different special ability, but the rest are all very minor stuff like being able to swap weapons or survive more hits.

All these limp power-ups and abilities mean it’s much harder to turnaround a race than it would be in an actual Mario Kart game. And while people might complain about blue shells and rubber band artificial intelligence the alternative presented here is still far less interesting.

It’s still never a disaster though, even with the insistence on having a F-Zero style pit stop to repair damage. The split screen four-player mode in particular is a lot of fun, much more so than the 12-player online option. The other game modes are less inspiring though and predictably there’s very little entertainment here for a solo player, with a very bare bones career mode.

Given how strange the whole concept is many will dismiss F1 Race Stars outright, and while it’s certainly not a particularly good game you can see that Codemasters have struggled to make the best of a bad job. But amongst such a large field of rival clones, and especially this month, F1 Race Stars is not a front-runner.

In Short: Formula 1 crossed with Mario Kart is almost made to seem an inspired idea, but the restrictions of the licence drag this promising racer down.